Sevim Sertel O’Brien was the daughter of two of the most prominent public intellectuals of Turkey’s single-party era (1923-1950), M. Zekeriya and Sabiha Sertel. Born shortly after the close of World War I, her earliest years were spent in New York City, where her parents were students at Columbia University, and later spent much of her adolescence and young adulthood in Turkey after they returned in 1923 following the close of the Independence War. She would later become a frequent contributor to her parents’ newspaper, Tan, and by World War II she had married an American AP Press Attache named Frank O’Brien. Following the war, and her parents’ eventual exile to the USSR in 1950, Sevim and Frank raised their three children in the United States, primarily in the Washington, DC suburb of Chevy Chase, MD. In this paper I will discuss an as-yet unpublished memoir composed by Sevim Sertel which was meant as a way of relaying her years in Turkey to her own children. It is written in English, since her children did not take Turkish lessons in the States, and in the genre of a bedtime story. The stories vibrantly retell the experience of living in a tumultuous and rapidly changing society wherein the roles of men and women were changing. It sheds light on the lives of her parents, who held a prominent yet tenuous position as public intellectuals who were not always supportive of the policies of Mustafa Kemal and his successor İsmet İnönü. In the context of this panel, my paper will engage with the memoir as a document that remembers the intellectual history of the early Republic in a uniquely feminine manner, one that emphasized gender as a component to Kemalist modernity, and highlighted the limits placed on women in the public sphere. The paper will also place Sevim’s memories in an intellectual context with both her own writing in Tan, and the political outlook of her parents as a way of asking questions about how attitudes towards Kemalism changed over the course of generations.